Monday, May 27, 2013

An Explosive Update: Melon Bombs

Okay, I added a cool new item to the game, the Melon Bomb.

The artist promises not everything will have skulls on it. But come on, it's a bomb.

BUT before I get to that and the accompanying video, I just wanted to point out that Super Obelisk is 100% rendered in OpenGL now. I have nothing but praise for the folks behind SlimDX, but in the end I wanted to open up the potential for ports to Mac/Linux, and consoles. The game feels best with a gamepad, so the push to consoles is a pretty attractive prospect.

Anyway, I'm using OpenTK now, which is a framework that includes C# bindings to OpenGL. This, combined with Mono (cross-platform implementation of C#/.Net) should make the porting process smooth.

So, yeah, that took a bit of time, since I haven't touched OpenGL in many years, but overall it was a pleasant experience. I was pretty eager to get back into developing something concrete after getting things back to where they were, so I thought up the Melon Bomb, which is a bomb that happens to look like a melon.

You can lay the bomb down. You can toss the bomb in front of you. Or, you can charge up a throw and launch it across the screen at your enemies! But why read about it when you can watch it all in action? As always, here's this weeks video. As always, best to open it up and put it in HD with annotations on, since they explain what's actually happening.

No new infrastructure was required for the bomb update--just a new behavior and a new graphic asset. That's a good sign--that means engine development is slowing down and game implementation is speeding up!